Voice of the Free Press: Shock, horror and recognition

Sep. 18, 2013

Written by

Free Press Editorial Page Editor

A man with a gun walks into a building and open fires, killing people who were simply going about their day.

This time, the shooting took place on a military base in Washington, just blocks from the U.S. Capitol. Twelve people are dead, as well as the gunman.

The nation responds once again with shock, horror and, perhaps saddest of all, recognition.

Another troubled person responds to his personal demons with a gun and people are dead.

We live in a time when “mass shooting” has become part of the vernacular, a phrase we have come to hear all to often.

The actions of a lone gunman take words that used to represent a community and turn them into shorthand for tragedy — Columbine in 1999, Virginia Tech in 2007, Fort Hood in 2009, Tucson in 2011, Aurora in July 2012and, Newtown in December of the same year, and now Navy Yard.

Even at a distance of a few days, when the immediate chaos has subsided and facts have begun to emerge, the Navy Yard shooting makes no more sense than the other recent mass shootings.

We now know that authorities have identified the dead shooter as Aaron Alexis, a 34-year-old man who was discharged from the Navy Reserve in 2011 for “a pattern of misconduct” including a gun incident.

As The Washington Post reports, a “Navy official said Alexis was given a ‘general discharge,’ a classification often used to designate a blemished performance record.”

In August, police in Newport, R.I., received a call from Alexis who complained about “voices harassing him, wanting to harm him,” according to The Associated Press.

The New York Times reports Alexis “exhibited signs of mental illness dating back more than a decade.”

Whatever his reasons, Alexis found a gun to be a more readily available answer to his problems than what had been offered by the Department of Veterans Affairs mental health professionals who had treated him.

This, too, is a familiar tale — putting together the patterns of a troubled mind only in the wake of a horrific event. It is as if we need to find a thread of recognizable madness in the shooter to distinguish him from our neighbors and our coworkers, our friends and our family, and, perhaps, ourselves.

Mental illness and guns is a toxic mixture, and the nation continues to fail confronting either.